page_title: Galaxy Zoo
section_title: Galaxy mergers and interactions
hierarchical_section_title: Galaxy Zoo / Galaxy mergers and interactions
caption_attribution_description: The Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), the newest camera on NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope, has captured a spectacular pair of galaxies engaged in a celestial dance of cat and mouse or, in this case, mouse and mouse. Located 300 million light-years away in the constellation Coma Berenices, the colliding galaxies have been nicknamed "The Mice" because of the long tails of stars and gas emanating from each galaxy. Otherwise known as NGC 4676, the pair will eventually merge into a single giant galaxy.
context_page_description: Galaxy Zoo is a crowdsourced astronomy project which invites people to assist in the morphological classification of large numbers of galaxies. It is an example of citizen science as it enlists the help of members of the public to help in scientific research.
  There have been 15 versions as of July 2017. Galaxy Zoo is part of the Zooniverse, a group of citizen science projects. An outcome of the project is to better determine the different aspects of objects and to separate them into classifications.
context_section_description: Galaxy Zoo Mergers was a Galaxy Zoo project started in November 2009 and retired in June 2012. There have also been a number of studies on galaxy mergers, among which was a survey of ≈3000, which presented "the largest, most homogeneous catalogue of merging galaxies in the nearby universe". This catalogue was spread over two papers and was a result of volunteers selecting likely candidates from Galaxy Zoo 1 and posting them on the Galaxy Zoo forum. Other papers that have used Galaxy Zoo data resulted in observations that include those taken by the Chandra X-ray Observatory.
caption: A HST image of the 'Mice Galaxies' which are in the process of merging.
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